Pass the cheesecake – “The “Golden Girls” are hot again.
Each week, 13 million viewers tune in to Lifetime to watch Bea Arthur, Rue McClanahan, Betty White and Estelle Getty play a group of randy, mature women living together.
Viewers have plenty of options – it airs seven times each weekday.
But the audience isn’t just geezers who can’t work the remote control. The 11 p.m. EDT airing of “Golden Girls” attracts as many women in the 18-to-34 age group as MTV.
Likewise, a June 2 reunion of the “Golden Girls” cast was the most-watched special in Lifetime’s 19-year history, attracting 4.2 million. It will air again in August.
And Entertainment Weekly put “Golden Girls” on its 2003 “It List,” the editors’ annual collection of favorite pop-culture people and things of the moment. And there are dozens of Internet fan sites, including Germany’s “Blanche Online.”
“Golden Girls” has even been compared with “Sex and the City” in its portrayal of women with active sex lives who weren’t afraid to talk about them.
“Golden Girls” ended its prime-time run on NBC in 1992 and has run continuously on Lifetime since 1997. But it has developed an “I Love Lucy” kind of endurance among new generations of viewers, said Lifetime senior vice president and TV historian Tim Brooks. Nearly 30 percent of the E-mails the network receives about the show are from college students.
What gives a show about white-hairs such youth appeal?
“They are young people in older people’s bodies” said Brooks. “They didn’t care what anybody thought about them. They all dated. They talked about sex. Young people relate to people who think like them more than they do to people who look like them.”
Brandon Tartikoff, NBC’s 1980s programming chief, came up with the idea of “Golden Girls” after hearing his elderly relatives speak their minds during a visit in Miami. His lieutenant at the time, Warren Littlefield, enlisted Susan Harris, the creator of the groundbreaking comedy “Soap,” to write the series.
Putting sex chat and snappy putdowns in the mouths of older women made such comments more palatable in the 1980s, when prime time was tamer. “Golden Girls” was also ahead of the curve in dealing with hot-button topics like interracial dating, AIDS and homosexuality.
Aside from those issues, which are still relevant today, there are few contemporary references that date the show. As older characters, the “Girls” weren’t slaves to fashion or music trends that would be stale by now.
But their attitude is timeless.
Said Brooks: “They are four adults who are rebelling and doing what they damn please.”
—
(c) 2003, New York Daily News.
Visit the Daily News online at http://www.nydailynews.com/
Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
AP-NY-06-25-03 0928EDT
Send questions/comments to the editors.
